


Healing

by anotherhinnyfan



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-13 00:28:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28644456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anotherhinnyfan/pseuds/anotherhinnyfan
Summary: The story of how Damon Salvatore copes with humanity after his brother's death.
Relationships: Elena Gilbert/Damon Salvatore
Comments: 6
Kudos: 11





	Healing

For the week after Stefan’s death, Damon Salvatore is never left alone. He’s never had the best reputation for handling pain, so it felt like a good idea to keep him surrounded by his friends. At the memorial, townspeople pour through the doors to pay their respects to ‘a young man taken too soon’, and each one of them come to him, offering their condolences as he nods perfunctorily and thanks them. People even come to the boarding house to drop off casseroles that mostly remain uneaten for days. But the thing about death is that it is so easily forgotten, and it’s not long before even Bonnie and Alaric and the rest of them get back to their lives, and it’s just him and Elena in the old Salvatore house, left to grieve their loss alone. She worries about him and the way he downs his alcohol – his body isn’t what it used to be – but she says nothing. In fact, most of that first month is spent in near silence, sitting on opposite ends of the sofa, neither one of them able to speak without their eyes watering. Some days are better than others, days spent holding each other instead of avoiding each other, days that give them hope that they’ll make it through this. But the days hardly matter when every night, like clockwork, he succumbs to the guilt that eats away at him, as Elena wakes up to Damon violently thrashing around between the sheets. Though he never says what he dreams about, she knows, she knows that it’s the same one every time as she looks at the cold sheen of sweat on his face, features contorted as if in pain, and hears his repeated mumbles of _no_ , and _it should have been me_. She doesn’t know what to do except hold him, until he eventually falls back into sleep.

Stefan is gone, but the world keeps moving at that relentless pace, never easing up. Eventually, September rolls around and he has to drop Elena off at college. There’s a sharp pang in his chest as he kisses her goodbye, but he still smiles as he watches her walk away from him, until she is lost in the throngs of students and the quirk of his lips melts away. The drive back home seems longer than it is, and it is silent and painfully lonely. But nothing beats the moment that he steps inside a cold and empty house, seeing two bourbon glasses set on the table, realizing that for the first time in years, he is completely and utterly alone. His breath hitches in his throat, and he knows it’s time. He trudges up the stairs to the one place he couldn’t bring himself to go for months – Stefan’s room. It’s high time that he clears it out. The door creaks as he hesitantly pushes it open, and the floorboards whine under his weight. There are spider webs decorating the walls, but everything else is exactly as it was, only covered with a thick layer of dust. His legs are unsteady as he steps further, and he takes his time to look around the room. Something blue catches his eye from the dresser next to him, and he picks it up gently. _Hair Gel, Extra Hold_ , the label reads, and despite himself, he snorts with laughter, because for just a second, he is back in time with his brother, poking fun at him like big brothers do. For a second, he feels happy. “So, this is how you get your hero hair on,” he says mockingly, so deep in his reverie that he forgets that no one was listening, that Stefan wasn’t really there. The laughter fades as reality hits him like a freight train, knocking the breath out of his lungs; his knees fold easily like a paper doll, and he falls to the floor. Losing Stefan has left bullet holes in him, and every day since, he tries to cover them with band aids, in a desperate attempt to lessen the pain, to remedy the wound. It is at this moment, when he is at his most vulnerable, when his spirits are at their lowest, that those old band aids are forcibly ripped off, and the first painful sob racks through his body. Tears wet the dusty wooden floor like rain as he cries, shoulders heaving, hands tugging at his hair in fistfuls, _wishing_ that he had a humanity switch.

How does one heal from the loss of a brother? How can you fill the void that they leave behind? He was beginning to think it was impossible. A few months pass and he still drowns in his own torment, spending his days in the house he can’t stand to live in anymore because _everywhere he looks, he sees Stefan_. He knows he would give anything to see him again, to hug him, to tell him just how _sorry_ he is. And sometimes he does think he catches a glimpse of his hair, or his hand, maybe him sitting on the couch beside him but it’s all illusions, cruel tricks that his own mind plays on him. He’s certain that he’s finally going insane now that Elena isn’t here to keep him in check 24/7 – it was bound to happen _someday_ after all – the guilt of a century and a half’s misdeeds is catching up to him at last. He has no idea that Elena is just as miserable at her school, that every time she sees a name on a hospital clipboard that looks like his, the back of a brunette head in the classroom or hears a voice that reminds her of _him_ , she has to excuse herself for a moment to blink away the tears, and the tears always come at the memory of him, her first love, the one who saved her life countless times, the one who showed her what life _was_ – knowing that she would never get to see him again, that she would never get to thank him, was almost too much to bear. She makes a trip home almost every weekend to be with Damon, but it doesn’t change much for either of them. No matter how hard they try, they can’t seem to escape from their grief, not while they keep living in this old house. Every inch of it is covered in memories, memories that hurt too much. They know they have to get out, that they won’t have a chance in hell at normalcy if they keep surrounding themselves with the past, with their _guilt_. One night before she has to leave for Whitmore again, they brainstorm ideas for what to do with the house, not wanting to sell it to just anyone, until the idea of a school pops into Elena’s head. Not an ordinary school, but a school for supernatural kids. It seems like the most noble option, the one that Stefan would have approved of most. When they propose the idea to Alaric and Caroline, it catches them by surprise, but they agree that it’s a great idea, especially with the twins getting older and their magic getting harder to contain.

Once the decision has been made official, he decides that it’s high time to try to live, time to step up and be the man that Elena deserves. He’s made so many mistakes in life, so many wrong choices, but no more. He owed that much to Stefan. So, he buys a small building on the outskirts of Mystic Falls, intent on following his dream at last – running a bar of his own. The two of them could live on the upper story – it wouldn’t be big or fancy, but he knows it’s only temporary. He has his own plans that he keeps well-hidden from her, and with her being so busy with school and interning at the hospital, she hardly suspects a thing. He donates the boarding school to Caroline, and although saying goodbye to it makes him sadder than he would admit, he knows it’s the best thing to do. For the next eight months, he spends every waking minute without Elena on renovating the ground floor into a bar, and on his secret project. With every passing day, he spends less time brooding and more time doing something with his life – he becomes more and more his old self, filling out the hollow shell that he was. At last when the day comes that his secret could be unveiled, he insists on blindfolding a very curious and confused Elena before he starts driving so that she wouldn’t see where they were going. The car comes to a stop in only around 20 minutes, and he helps her stumble out of the car and eases off the blindfold. When she opens her eyes, her heart skips several beats as she blinks, unable to believe what she sees as they stand on the porch of her old house, the very same one that she had burned down so many years ago. The first place they had ever kissed. Hot tears prick at her eyes as she tries to speak but all she manages to get out is a raspy “How?”

“I’ve been rebuilding it the past few months,” he replies warily, feeling slightly worried because this wasn’t the reaction he expected – as he searches her eyes, he can’t tell if she’s crying out of happiness or because he’s just made the biggest mistake, but all signs of doubt fly out of his mind when she flings herself at him, wrapping her arms around him in a desperately tight hug. He brushes her hair with his hand, letting her cry against his shoulder for a while, before leading her inside. The furniture and the picture frames are different, and the walls are a shade darker than they used to be, but somehow everything is the same. It’s warm, it’s comforting, it’s everything that they needed to truly start over. It’s _home_.

Flash forward to a few years later and the bar is well established and crowded every night. Elena is officially a med school graduate and moves back to Mystic Falls for good. She always knew that she wanted a life here, and it’s a good life; and though the events of the past still haunt them and the memories of the people they lost still linger, they don’t feel as burdened by that loss. They have the strength to keep moving. One night when Elena comes home after a particularly grueling shift, she is surprised to find her favorite flowers covering what looked to be every surface of the house, with tealight candles on every table. That was the night she would find Damon in their kitchen, propped up on one knee, holding up a ring. And months later, standing at the altar beside his best friends, no, his _family,_ in front of the small crowd at their wedding, he thinks about the hell that life had put them both through, everything that they had to endure to make it here today. But when he sees her in white, floating down the aisle like an angel, dark hair cascading down her shoulders, he knows he would do it all over again for her without a second thought. As Jeremy gives her away, he makes one last sarcastic quip at Damon before pulling him into a tight embrace, finally accepting him completely. He wishes that Stefan were here to see this, to finally see him evolve into a man that was deserving of love, someone good, but Stefan was the only reason any of this was happening. All he could do was pray that one fateful day he would see him again, so that he could thank him for his life.

The day that Elena tells him that she is pregnant, he does the last thing she expected him to do. He cries, and he smiles, and cries some more as he wraps his arms around her, burying his face in the crook of her neck. He kisses her belly even though she’s not even showing yet, before he kisses her on the lips, trying to convey his emotions without any words, to let her know just how much he loved her. At the first visit to the sonographer, his face lights up in a way that she had never seen before as he stares at his child, no bigger than a jellybean, on that black and white screen. They both agree that they don’t want to know the sex of the baby, saying that it wouldn’t make any kind of difference. He vows to be the exact opposite of his father – come hell or high water, he will love this child until his dying breath.

On an extremely busy evening at the bar, he gets the call that Elena went into labor at work and he literally drops everything he is holding and runs to his car, barely managing to let his employees know what’s going on. His knuckles are tight around the steering wheel, tapping it incessantly, the nervous energy coming off of him in waves. Thankfully, he manages to get to the hospital in around a half hour, probably by breaking a few speed limits, but he’d be damned if he missed the birth of his first child. When he rushes into the private room, he sees his beautiful wife on a bed, face scrunched up in agony as she endures a painful contraction. It breaks his heart knowing that she’s not even halfway there, that there is more pain to be felt. It is hours before she is finally ready, ready to bring their child into the world. He holds her hand through it all, whispering praise in her ear, letting her crush his fingers in her surprisingly strong hand – it was the least he could do, after all – and as her yells of pain are finally cut off by a high pitched wail, everyone in the room goes quiet. His hands shake as he watches the nurses take his baby away to be cleaned up, and when they come back, one of them is holding a little pink bundle in her arms. _A girl_.

Damon has never felt happier in his life than in this little room, with the two most important women in his life. Their friends are waiting outside but they request some time alone before they let anyone come and visit – both wanting a few private moments with just the three of them. Elena holds their sleepy little girl against her chest, a tired euphoria in her eyes, as Damon sits on the edge of the bed next to her, his arm caressing her back. “What should we name her?” he asks softly, placing a gentle kiss on the side of her head. The baby wakes up at that very moment, almost as if to answer him, and stares at her mother. Tears well up as Elena looks into her child’s eyes and finds that achingly familiar forest green staring back at her. She knows exactly what her name is, without question. She looks to Damon, laughing quietly through her tears, her heart completely full for the first time in years, and speaks.

“This is Stefanie.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading <3 comments and kudos are golden! Find me on tumblr @elijahs-wife :)


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